Merchants Rate Email Marketing, SEO and Paid Search Most Valuable

In Multichannel Merchant’s MCM Outlook survey released this month, respondents rated email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search as the top three most valuable online marketing channels. Social media marketing and online display ads rounded out the top five. Sending offline traffic online and affiliate marketing were the only two channels that were perceived as less valuable this year.

Data from the MCM Outlook survey also found another interesting fact. For 86% of merchants, they are no longer using sales as the most important metric for measuring their SEO and search engine marketing efforts, they are measuring traffic and the quality of those visitors.

Secondly, 72% of merchants are examining their conversion rates and click-through rates a little closer than they were in the years prior. This means that not only do merchants have a greater understanding of the data provided by web analytics; they are using tools to interpret and understand their traffic. In fact, 3 in 5 merchants stated they are diving deeper into analytics and analyzing the data to make improvements.

Other interesting findings include that 63% of merchants continue to optimize and re-optimize their landing pages and 58% look to blogging and link building as a way to improve search engine rankings. The use of video marketing took the largest jump, where 44% of merchants stated they are using videos, up from 15% last year.